Social media, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is used extensively by many functional areas in companies today to communicate about and promote their efforts, and to interact with their constituencies. For the marketing department, in particular, social media can help build brand awareness, improve (or destroy overnight!) the company’s reputation, and engender customer loyalty. It also offers the hope of achieving the ultimate dream of any marketing professional – to see their new marketing campaign “go viral” on the Internet. When skillfully used by the HR department or a hiring manager, social media can quickly find talented new hires using an informal network of millions of interconnected people. And free social media tools are being widely used today as internal platforms for distributing key announcements as well. For example, Twitter is being used extensively to keep employees up-to-speed on important company news, “Didn’t you read this morning’s Tweet from the CEO.”
As beneficial as social media is for business – and it surely is as organizations are beginning to realize that it also brings with it a multitude of problems. Most of these problems have been seen before, going back to the genesis of the Internet: lost productivity, misuse of network bandwidth, exposure to unmanaged content, security threats, and confidential data leakage. But some of them are unique to and exacerbated by this new social media phenomenon that has exploded onto the Internet over the past few years.